Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2012
Abstract
Assigning products to and retrieving them from proper storage locations are crucial in minimizing the operating cost of a unit-load warehouse. The problem becomes intractable when the warehouse faces variable supply and uncertain demand in a multi-period setting. We assume a factor-based demand model in which demand for each product in each period is affinely dependent on some uncertain factors. The distributions of these factors are only partially characterized. We introduce a robust optimization model that minimizes the worst-case expected total travel in the warehouse with distributional ambiguity of demand. Under a linear decision rule, we obtain a storage and retrieval policy by solving a moderate-size linear optimization problem. Surprisingly, despite imprecise specification of demand distributions, our computational studies suggest that the linear policy achieves close to the expected value given perfect information, and significantly outperforms existing heuristics in the literature.
Keywords
inventory, production, uncertainty, programming, linear, large scale systems, transportation, materials handling
Discipline
Operations and Supply Chain Management
Research Areas
Operations Management
Publication
Management Science
Volume
58
Issue
11
First Page
2114
Last Page
2130
ISSN
0025-1909
Identifier
10.1287/mnsc.1120.1543
Publisher
INFORMS
Citation
ANG, Teck Meng Marcus; LIM, Yun Fong; and SIM, Melvyn.
Robust Storage Assignment in Unit-Load Warehouses. (2012). Management Science. 58, (11), 2114-2130. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/3194
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1120.1543
Comments
Published version made available in SMU repository with permission of INFORMS, 2014, February 28